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Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio star in Scorsese's Shutter Island.Andrew Cooper

Shutter Island

  • Directed by Martin Scorsese
  • Written by Laeta Kalogridis
  • Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley
  • Classification: NA

Martin Scorsese's latest, Shutter Island, poses a dilemma that audiences rarely have to face. The film's final 15 minutes are intriguing and truly gripping, leaving us to exit the theatre beguiled by the story's resolution but struggling with a much larger and lingering question: Was it worth slogging through the nearly two hours of damned muddle to get to those last affecting moments? Not often in movies is the destination so much better than the journey.

The trip begins in fog, literally, as a ferry chugs through the murk towards an island in the Boston harbour, an isolated place that houses an asylum for the criminally insane. The time is 1954, and on board are two U.S. marshals. Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the senior of the pair, a hard-boiled veteran of both law enforcement and the Second World War. Hard-boiled but, as the boat rolls, vulnerable too - he's seasick and, what's more, is still grieving over the death of his wife in a flash fire. His partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) is newer to the job, yet seems a calmer soul, an anchor of steadiness. They're heading over to investigate the disappearance of a female patient, a mother confined for murdering her three children, who has inexplicably escaped and has yet to be found.

Immediately upon their arrival, the score strikes up a shamelessly melodramatic pounding, and the pathetic fallacy follows with hurricane force. Yes, "a storm is coming." Is it ever, although the wind and rain are the least of the problems. Instead, right quick, it's hailing genres, it's sleeting styles, it's pouring themes, as Scorsese, drawing upon his encyclopedic store of filmic references, blows up a bloody cyclone of movie quotes that has us less impressed than confused, less illuminated than blinded. Why the outpouring?

Well, partly it's the fault of the source material: The Dennis Lehane novel, a departure from his usual street-crime grittiness, is something of a Gothic mishmash. Partly it's a function of the period setting: The early fifties are a murky time indeed, with its own twin fogs of war, the residue of the global conflict that ended and the mire of the Cold War that replaced it. And partly it's attributable to the labyrinthine plot and the asylum locale: There, psychiatry is itself conflicted about how to treat the mentally ill, with the surgeons who lobotomize battling the pharmacists who tranquilize.

So, as Teddy and his apparently fragile self enter the frays, we're suddenly watching multiple flicks at once. The cop investigation is detective noir. The loony bin shenanigans, heightened by the ominous presence of Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow on the medical staff, is psycho-horror. The emerging possibility that pernicious brain experiments are going on, funded by the government, is pure conspiracy thriller, tinged with McCarthy-era paranoia. The flashbacks to Teddy's military past - he helped to liberate Dachau - is documentary realism. But the recurring dream sequences, where his late wife keeps popping up in flames, are Daliesque surrealism. And when the action shifts beyond the hospital walls, and rats by the hundreds start scurrying out of cliff-side caves, it's just B-movie schlock.

In his great iconic works, Scorsese always professed a disdain for directing plot - character, dialogue, mood, those were his passion. Here, faced with a veritable avalanche of plot cascading off in unlikely directions, he retreats into quotation. Preminger, Fuller, Hitchcock and others beyond count all get their due, lovingly so. Consequently, in lieu of a single coherent style, it's like flipping the pages of a cinematic dictionary. The cliché used to be that old directors never die, they become photographers. Not Scorsese - seems he's becoming a lexicographer.

All this puts his recent go-to actor, DiCaprio, in a quandary, forced to adapt his performance to the ever-changing flicks. Under the circumstances, he does remarkable well - tough cop one moment, broken vessel the next - and manages to neatly embody the Cuckoo's Nest question at the centre of the piece: Just who's crazy in this mad microcosm of a world, and who isn't?

Again, the eventual reply, in those climactic frames, is by far the sanest part of the picture, when it finally settles into focus, allowing us to see clearly and feel, if not anything profound, at least something palpable. Yet that bigger question remains and, as the lights come up, so does the answer: Sorry, but the late reward hardly justifies all that punishment.

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